Quadruple Digits
by Mauve Alert
Summary: The child could not be made amenable to rules. A father and his son at three points in time.


A/N- Points to whoever recognizes the quote in the summary.

**Quadruple Digits**

_I.  
_

"Good Lord," says the Time Lord. "Isn't that your son?"

The father of the boy in question follows his friend's gaze. His hearts momentarily stop beating at what he sees, but he must remain composed; it doesn't do for a Time Lord to have a reputation for being overly emotional, as he is beginning to. So, as the father in him flies into panic, the aristocrat in him says: "Yes, that would appear to be my son."

"What _is_ he doing?"

"It would appear," the father replies slowly, feeling a headache coming on, "that he is trying to climb out his window using a rope made of tied-together bedsheets."

The other Time Lord is astonished. "Whatever for?"

"Amusement, probably." Last week the boy tried to fly by jumping off a garden shed. With a sigh, the father calls the housekeeper on his communications device. "My dear, would you please send some servants over to the South gardens, underneath the boy's bedroom? With a ladder, kindly?" She doesn't find this request at all strange. This, he feels, speaks volumes.

"Father!" calls the boy, as he dangles merrily at the end of his makeshift rope. "Look."

"Yes, son, I see. What _are_ you doing?"

"I'm stuck!" He seems deeply thrilled by this situation.

The father counts to ten, finds it doesn't help. "Are you going to fall?"

"I don't think so!"

He's going to need to count more.

"I'm terribly sorry about this," he tells the other Time Lord, as the servants come running with a ladder, followed by a handful of spectators curious to see what the boy has done this time.

"Oh, not at all. It's quite exciting."

"_Exciting_ is not precisely the word I would use." He addresses one of the servants, "No, man, off the ladder, I'll go get him."

The father waits until they are both safely on the ground before voicing every parent's catchphrase: "_What_, in the name of all that is sacred, were you thinking?"

The boy looks down at his feet, shamefaced. "I didn't use enough sheets," he admits. "Next time I'll get it right."

Shaking his head, the father sighs and says, "By the black scrolls, boy, I don't know how you'll ever reach your one-thousandth birthday."

The boy considers this. "I think I'll try for my tenth first."

_II.  
_

The years pass and the boy does what all boys do: grows up and goes to the Academy, where he makes both friends and waves. They call him Theta Sigma, Rassilon knows why, and though the father doesn't entirely approve of his son's friends he has to be grateful, because they're probably the only reason that Theta isn't failing out of school.

He's a strange young man, Theta Sigma, a poor student and constantly in trouble but clever, frightfully clever, an idiosyncrasy burning bright and mauve through Gallifrey's ivory towers.

The father sees it all too clearly on the day they bury the boy's mother.

"Don't cremate me," his wife told him once. "It's messy and the smell is horrid." Just bury me, in the ground, she said, and so that's what they do, humoring her and her strange human customs.

The father had known this day was coming, known it since the day he'd met her, but he hadn't expected it to hurt so. He hadn't expected the expression on his son's face as his mother is lowered into the dirt.

"She was so young," he says, and repeats it over and over again.

One of his friends puts an arm around his shoulders. "She was only a human, Thete. She was pretty old for a human."

Theta pulls away in disgust. "She was my _mother_, Koschei!"

"Sorry," says the other young man, inadequately. Death is not common on Gallifrey; neither of them knows quite how to deal with it.

The father can only watch. He is no longer the person that his son turns to for comfort.

A few weeks after the funeral the boy comes home suddenly, storms into his father's study. "How serious were you?" he asks, without so much as a hello.

The father looks up, surprised. "Shouldn't you be at school?"

"Father," the boy says, impatient. "Am I going to live to be one-thousand?"

"Of course," the father says. He's lying. There is no _of course_, no certainty. His son is too strange, too _other_.

Angrily the father's son stalks out. Even though Theta Sigma comes back sometimes, the boy never really does.

_III._

Theta Sigma graduates and takes a new appellation, the Doctor, just pretentious enough to satisfy the Time Lords and just odd enough to raise eyebrows. The father becomes a grandfather, and a great-grandfather. He has another son, a normal full-blooded Loom-born son, a boy who raises no eyebrows and makes no waves. The father never has to climb a ladder to rescue him and feels strangely disappointed.

One night the Doctor kidnaps his own grandchild and runs off in a stolen TARDIS. When the father finds out he is somehow relieved. His son has always been a threat, an omen, the deathly quiet just before the storm hits. Oh, he's misbehaved, failed exams, made messes and given headaches, but he never went too far, never did anything that couldn't be fixed easily enough. For two and a half centuries he's danced on the precipice while thumbing his nose at all of them; now, finally, he's jumped, and the father has the comfort of thinking that there is nothing else his son could possibly do that would surprise him.

The Doctor spends the next several centuries proving him utterly wrong.

Then, one day, he swans into his father's study, unannounced and nonchalant. Without preface he takes a seat opposite his father's desk and props up his feet on the ancient wood. "I rather like these shoes," he announces, with calculated mischief. "They were given to me by a quite stunning woman not long after she killed me."

There's a gleam in his eye that the father hasn't seen for many hundreds of years.

"Another body gone," the father comments, mostly to himself, pouring them drinks as he takes in his son's newest regeneration. So very young, in aspect and in demeanor; the ancient, weary shrewdness of the last one is nowhere in sight, hidden behind an unruly mop of curls. He's wearing velvet, by the black scrolls.

They stare at each other for a moment, sipping very expensive liquor in silence. "Have you been to see the Lady President?" the father inquires at last.

"Romana?" His son has a pet name for the President. This, the father feels, speaks volumes. "Oh, yes. She met me at my ship to arrest me."

"And did she?" the father asks, rising to the dare inherent in the Doctor's tone. He doesn't even bother raising his eyebrows at the phrasing "my ship"; no one's bothered arguing _that_ point for centuries now.

"Oh, yes," says the Doctor. "Quite the arresting lady, Romana."

"What did she think of the new regeneration?" He regrets this question the moment it sneaks off his tongue.

The Doctor's eyebrows quirk again. "Oh, I daresay she liked it."

The father refuses to think further on this statement and thus risk neural implosion. "You ought to be more careful about these regenerations, you know. This is what, your eighth body, isn't it?"

"You ought to be a little more careless," the Doctor returns. He sips his drink pensively for a moment. "You've never died, have you, Father?"

He's only regenerated once, under controlled conditions. "No. I haven't, you know that."

"Well." Another pause, another sip of liquor. "I'll say this. You haven't lived at all until you've died." Behind the mask of mischief his eyes are very, very old. A shiver runs down the father's spine.

He remembers that the boy once tried to fly by throwing himself off the top of a garden shed.

The father's other son never says things like this. With his other son he always knows where he stands; there's never a question of whether the other son is speaking truthfully, or trying to get a rise out of him, or both, because he's not imaginative enough to lie or rebellious enough to shock. The other son is too busy trying not to be the disappointment he thinks his brother was, and the father is guiltily thankful for his blindness.

He thinks for a long time, staring into the glass of amber liquor. Finally, he lets out a resigned bark of a laugh. "Every time I think that there's nothing left you could possibly say or do that would surprise me."

With affected gravity, the Doctor arches his eyebrows and says, "I'd say it's a miracle I've made it this far, wouldn't you?"

Ah, so he does remember; that is why he's here. "I thought you'd forget," the father confesses. "You do tend to lose track of the years, don't you?"

"Only on purpose," the Doctor quips, with a charming smile, and raises his glass in toast. It's empty, but he doesn't seem to care or even to notice. "One-thousand, Father. What do you think of that?" His eyes sparkle with mirth. The boy, perhaps, has returned, if only briefly.

The father drains his glass, and flings down the other gauntlet.

"You'll never make it to two."

_- FIN -_


End file.
